Claiming the Property of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard
This chapter examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), a postmodern novel involving a woman from 1976 traveling back through time to the nineteenth-century world of slavery, and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006), a poetry collection focusing on the death of Trethewey’s mother and the forgotten history of black Union soldiers stationed at Ship Island, Mississippi, during the Civil War. Both texts show the haunting caused by the conflation of people with property, and both reverse the direction of this haunting to show the present haunting the past. This chapter argues that these narratives not only reveal that slavery haunts us; they expose how we haunt slavery. Through the haunting backwards allowed by time travel, the authors claim the property of history, a claim that rewrites the paradigm of power in slavery.